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Comment by emmaglossy | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes you don't really have a choice if all your friends and family use Facebook...

No. Really. You do have a choice. Exercising unpopular choices frequently requires a spine.

Individually, you have a choice. But not using e.g. WhatsApp needs to be a collective decision or it won't work because everybody else is still stuck in there.

I know some of this is regional, but despite the myriad chat services, I quit them all and have been doing just fine with email and SMS. Can't use phone numbers since it's all spam all the time, tho.

There is no such thing as a "collective decision". There is only the decision of each person. Any movement to quit these sickness-inducing manipulators has to start somewhere otherwise you end up like those Buddhists who won't enter Nirvana until all other creatures are also ready to enter Nirvana, so they all end up hanging about outside the gates (as it were...), forever waiting.

The decision to be the first,... to lead,... to tread without trepidation where others fear to go,... that's what I called growing a spine. "Won't work because everybody else is still stuck in there" is simply an expression of that fear.

You're acting like we can't use multiple systems, or that people care if they can interact with us...

Let's say you run your own mail server. How much privacy do you really gain if 99% of the mail that comes in and goes out passes through Google servers? It doesn't matter what you do by yourself. You just can't expect everybody to run their own mail server. I run my own mail server, and while I'm happy to be self-reliant, it's hardly a win for my privacy (also, mail server administration is a pita).

Same goes for every other communication tech. Just because your endpoint is not spied upon, if every other endpoint is spied upon you gain nothing. If you don't use WhatsApp, but all your friends use WhatsApp to talk about you then you gained nothing.

If you really believe there is no such thing as collective decision-making then imho you already gave up in the fight for privacy.

But even if we boycot Google and Facebook, they are not the main problem. Their business model is the main problem. Spying on your users, training predictive models, and using those models to exploit people is simply too profitable, and therefore too attractive for any profit-seeking company to ignore.

Until we solve that problem by deciding as a society that these business models are not ok, this 1984-like world we currently live in will be our reality.

On the other hand, you could be the first among your family/friends to not use FB's products, and slowly others will follow.

I explicitly told everybody that I turned off messenger notifications on every device and uninstalled facebook from my devices years ago. If they want to reach me they can use Signal, Telegram or Keybase. Interestingly enough even my mother (in her 70s, no idea about computers) can use Telegram without a hickup. I guess it is a matter of dedication to push your peers off from Facebook.

> If they want to reach me they can use Signal, Telegram or Keybase.

Maybe even... gasp SMS. Or "telephone".

Sure but there are places like Berlin in Germany where network coverage is absolutely broken. Wifi works though. This is why the preference over SMS/GSM call.

SMS can be intercepted and read by essentially every country in the world and many criminal groups because of how flawed the protocol is. While smaller countries can't do mass ingress and automated analysis, they can still input your number into a system and then see what you text.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/19/ss7-hack-...

WhatsApp is almost certainly safer and more privacy respecting than Telegram.

Telegram uses highly nonstandard cryptography (the founder hired a bunch of math competition winners and told them to design encryption from first principles), doesn't have E2E by default (unlike Whatsapp), and is owned by a quite sketchy Russian oligarch who started spending on democracy-related causes after a falling out with Putin.

Telegram uses dubious encryption and lies about their business (for ex calling themselves a nonprofit when they aren't), and they retroactively retracted and then narrowed their bug bounty program.

WhatsApp hired the company behind Signal to help them implement Signal's encryption protocol.[1] While it's not as good as Signal because it's not open source and thus can't be independently verified, if Facebook deliberately lied about the security of a product used by governments around the world they would face serious consequences.[2]

See for example previous discussion [3].

For a detailed analysis of the flaws in their protocol, see [4]

1: https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/18/end-to-end-for-everyone/

2: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/world/asia/afghanistan-wh...

3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15281788

4: https://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-crypt...

> WhatsApp is almost certainly safer and more privacy respecting than Telegram.

I doubt this because WhatsApp is Facebook.

FB is bad, but Telegram has managed to be even worse, which is quite the accomplishment. Their crypto is fundamentally unsound, and their business practices dubious and unethical. See the links I posted.

You might be right -- I don't use either of them, so my interest in precisely who's worse is limited. Your argument leads me to think that they both should be avoided. In any case, regardless of whether or not Telegram is OK, nobody should be using Facebook products.

WhatsApp calls and messages were used by Facebook. The point is that even Telegram does the same they have much less data about me that they can use. It is a good enough replacement of SMS and GSM calls even with broken crypto. For sensitive communication I would definitely use Signal or Keybase instead. Those are the tools that we use for work related things like software development. Keybase is actually pretty amazing. I think even the crypto backing it is solid.

https://keybase.io/docs/crypto/overview

> WhatsApp calls and messages were used by Facebook.

If that's true that would be extremely serious, given that Whatsapp promises end-to-end encryption

> WhatsApp end-to-end encryption ensures only you and the person you're communicating with can read what's sent, and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp. Your messages are secured with locks, and only the recipient and you have the special keys needed to unlock and read your messages. For added protection, every message you send has an unique lock and key. All of this happens automatically: No need to turn on settings or set up special secret chats to secure your messages.

> Important: End-to-end encryption is always activated. There's no way to turn off end-to-end encryption.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/28030015/

Source please?

https://www.wired.com/story/whatsapp-security-flaws-encrypti...

That's a serious issue I wasn't aware of. Do note however that for this attack to work you have to not notice a user you don't know added to your group chat. Nevertheless, this is much more serious than I knew.

Isn't that choosing to be part of the problem then?

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